In In Defense of Self, director Linn Helene Løken and cinematographer Runar Sørheim work across intimate audio recordings, observational images and carefully constructed reenactments to tell the story of Morten Michelsen and his encounter with the institutions surrounding him. Rather than smoothing these elements into a single visual language, the film allows friction, contrast and disharmony to become part of its form.

In this conversation, Løken and Sørheim discuss the development of the film’s cinematic aesthetics: how they approached reconstruction, perspective and visual distance, and how embracing images that do not necessarily “match” can create a language capable of holding complexity, uncertainty and competing versions of reality.

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